Collections & Series

Who was Cassandra?

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

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February 09, 2015

I resolved to draw more creatures and humans in 2015, so the practice begins with my close-at-hand models. Manon is better at sitting still than J., but neither of them are particularly cooperative so I have to work fast or wait for them to fall asleep!

It's a matter of "practice, practice, practice, and don't worry about the failures and mistakes."

The lessons carry over even when the subject is an inanimate object. I like the spontaneity of drawing here; this is a little pot that my mother made.

And most of all, I want to have fun and enjoy it. I love the feeling of the brush on the paper and seeing the color flow out and create forms. Trying to work fast and spontaneously, and to capture some of the energy -- both of the living subjects and that of my own hand --in the drawings and sketchbook watercolors. I think of my old friend Aya Itagaki, a remarkable person and Sumi artist/Japanese calligrapher, whose work simply exploded onto the paper after some moments of silent, intense concentration and self-emptying. We need to let go of our thinking at a certain point, but one can only do that after lots and lots of practice and total awareness. I'm not there yet with this sort of drawing, but I trust the way forward.

February 06, 2015

The jazz pianist Vijay Iyer said a few things recently that resonated with me. He was talking in particular about jazz improvisation and about the notion of a "career" - a label he rejects. I think his comments can apply equally to all the arts.

"My primary orientation is as an artist and what that means is that I make things. I don’t make things in order to make money—I make things in order to communicate, reflect, meditate, and connect with people. It’s a personal practice. It’s a spiritual practice. It’s a social practice. And that’s really the foundation of everything I do."

--

"The most I can say is that it never feels finished to me—I never think I’ve mastered anything yet. I just think of myself as a student. I also work really hard on details and I don’t mean in an obsessive way—I mean in a patient way. You know when something is ready by not overthinking it and tapping into something that’s emotional and spiritual. You have to really wait until it hits you there and then you know you have something..."

--

"What is success? When it comes to making art, I don’t know what that is. I know what’s genuine and I know what I want to hear...The main thing is the value of being a performer is that I get to listen to the audience the whole time. I listen very carefully to them. It’s not about listening to them clapping—it’s about listening to them breathing. What are their bodies doing right now in relation to what I’m doing and are we connecting? If I always listen to that, then it’s not about success in terms of album sales or awards. It’s actually about meaning something to people and reaching people and making a difference."

--

These remarks are excerpts from an article in Fast Company, which came to my attention via the newsletter of the website Piano Street. Iyer is a classically-trained musician who studied both violin and piano, but he studied mathematics and physics as an undergrad at Yale, then started a doctorate in physics at Berkeley -- but music eventually won out. He's the recipient of a MacArthur grant and has recently been appointed to the music faculty at Harvard; meanwhile he is busy playing concerts and recording. Our friend Teju Cole recently performed with him in New York; Iyer has created a large performance work based on Open City.

January 07, 2015

Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, has come and gone, so Christmastide is officially over. For those of us who still live within a liturgical calendar, the end of Christmas means a look forward toward the rest of that child's life and eventual death, and toward our own as well. The other parts of that story are hinted at or even mentioned explicitly in a lot of the old Christmas carols and Advent motets, reminding me that in prior ages, human beings were not in the present state of denial about what happens to all of us. Christmas was joyful, but carried with it the same poignancy as every human birth, and in many of the songs about Mary, in particular, later events are darkly foreshadowed. The steady increase in life expectancy for adults in developed countries, the decrease in infant mortality, and the decreased likelihood of sudden death have all contributed to less preoccupation with being prepared to leave this mortal coil at any moment. That's nice for some of us, but a luxury that's still not available to millions of people on our planet. I ponder this as I survey the charitable donations I still haven't made for 2014.

Lent, the penitential season, comes early this year, and Easter could be - in Montreal at least - still a wintry holiday. Even though we're in the depths of winter right now, with new snow on top of ice just last night, and treacherous walking and driving everywhere, by the end of January the days will be visibly longer, and by the end of February, there will be palpable hints of the spring to come. I was surprised and happy, when drawing these little branches of holly, to notice little bunches of white flower buds at the tops of the stems, developing in the unexpected heat of the house. In the studio, my bougainvilla is putting out beautiful pink flower-bracts, while snow falls mercilessly a few inches away, outside the window. The life force is very great, even when we pluck and transplant ourselves and other species into unfamiliar environments; somehow, most of us survive to reproduce, create, and live this mysterious and miraculous existence, at least for a time.

January 02, 2015

My friend Martha remarked, on FB, that she was always impressed that when I drew my desk, it was neat. The thing is, I usually draw objects that I've put on the dining room table, not my desk, so it looks all nicely arranged. My actual desk looks like this today, and, typically, bears the evidence of many scattered projects in various states of completion: fleece from the quilt project; drawings and the lino block for a new relief print; calligraphy and drawing and painting tools; notes on a new photobook I'm designing, along with a sketch and some fountain pen tryouts; a can of fixative, Sumi ink and white gouche and a little bottle of drawing gum used as a resist in watercolor painting; a Square credit card reader for Phoenicia; my breakfast of Scottish oatmeal and coffee...and of course the computer.

About four months ago I made a decision to try to work at least half the day standing up. So there's a resolution made early that's already worked out pretty well. I think I work considerably more than half the time here at the tall adjustable drawing table I've had for thirty years, standing on an anti-fatigue mat. My blood sugar readings have been a little bit on the high-normal side for the past few years, and I'm hoping that less sitting, plus extra exercise and careful (non-holiday!) eating will keep that potential problem in check. It's hard to get enough exercise in a climate like this in the winter if you don't go to a gym, and it's also hard not to eat and drink too much in a deliciously food-centric city like Montreal. So, for the past three weeks, I've been walk/jogging/stair-climbing through the long hallways and basement of this big old industrial building three times a week, as well as my usual routine of stretches and calisthenics. I've only lost two of the six pounds I'd like to lose, but I feel better, except for the inevitable muscle aches and pains... What an annoyance it is to get older and have to think about this stuff! But we have to! I'm certainly grateful for the good health I've had most of my life, and want to do whatever I can to keep it, knowing we don't have control over a lot of what happens.

I always resolve not to make a list of resolutions, but do point myself in general directions like this, and the New Year represents is always a good time to take stock. A couple of blog-related tasks come to mind: to do a better back-up of Cassandra, and to improve my photo-management system, either cleaning up the mess of Picasa folders I've got now, or switching to a professional program. I'm really happy about the artwork progress in 2015, and want to continue that: drawing more people and animals, continuing to fill sketchbooks, as well as doing some larger easel paintings again. Reading is a given, and so is music, but it would be nice to touch the piano keys a little more often.

Still, all of these ideas merely skirt around the central questions of life and happiness: how to live with eyes and heart open within a world that is so tormented without getting depressed; how to get older gracefully and vibrantly; how to cultivate gratitude every day; how to be a kinder, gentler, ever-more-generous person while also taking care of one's own spirit and need for solitude, creativity, renewal; how to juggle our priorities and time and the needs of others clsoe to us; how to grow in love and awareness of the connectedness of everything. I don't think we can possibly make progress in these aspects of life without thinking about them and having a practice of reflection, anymore than we can keep our bodies in any sort of shape without conscious effort. Happiness is, I think, quite a relative thing, and not even a particularly useful term. I can't be "happy" when other people are suffering, but I'm also keenly aware of how beautiful life is, even when lived within significant limitations. What kind of person do I want to be when and if I reach 75, or 85, or even 90? What kind of person do I want to be if and when I have to deal with great grief, or the personal challenge of chronic or terminal illness? What makes someone the sort of person others want to be around, and what isolates others?

I don't have all the answers; I never will, but I know that a great deal of my emotional equilibrium depends on them. Isn't this why we read, and why we do creative work, and spiritual reflection, and why we enter into relationships, and why we get outside and look at nature and feel the wonder of our bodies moving and functioning in such intricate ways? Isn't every day, then, a new beginning, and a chance to find meaning in the apparent clutter of our complicated lives?

December 05, 2014

Once again, the internet thrums with indignation, a great deal of it spewing from the keyboards of white people who will never, ever, be in the same position as a poor black man, or a poor black woman, or child... or any black person for that matter.

Whether or not you think you are racist; whether or not, as you examine your conscience, you come up with anything you've personally done to hurt a black person, or advance the injustice that is endemic in American society and has been that way forever; whether or not you can wipe your own mental slate clean -- I simply want to say that we are all involved in systemic racism: if not by what we have done directly, then by what we have not done -- through our inattention, our turning away, and our refusal to use what we have been given, solely by virtue of our skin color, to create a society in which there is justice for all.

I grew up in a small town in the North where people were proud of not being racist. I went to a prestigious liberal university, and then lived in New England in a prestigious university town. Nobody would have ever said they were racist. But they were. They were racist about blacks, about Jewish people, about Muslims, about working class ethnic groups and the poor, about everyone who wasn't just exactly like them: privileged, educated, white. Racism lurked there, just beneath the surface, just as it does everywhere in America. It lives on in jokes, in social norms, in housing prices and club rules, in who we marry and who we associate with, who we vote for, who we let into our clubs and schools and workplaces, who gets beaten and arrested, who goes to prison, who is on death row.

This is indeed a time to examine our own consciences. A time to show up at a protest or prayer vigil. A time to say with sincerity, I am sorry, and I am deeply ashamed.

But it is also a time when less said might very well be more. Perhaps we white people could actually shut up for once and listen hard to the lived experience of the black people in our communities, and then use our considerable power to demand changes that address the inequalities, the injustice, the profiling, and the violence that are the reality every single day in the lives of so many of our fellow human beings.

November 25, 2014

Francis of Assisi granted all of reality, even elements and animals, an intimate I-Thou relationship. He called all things “sister” and “brother.” This could be a definition of what it means to be a contemplative, which is to look at reality with much wider eyes than mere usability, functionality, or self-interest, but with inherent enjoyment for a thing in itself as itself. Remember, as soon as your loving needs or wants a reward in return, you have backed away from divine love, which is why even our common notion of a “reward in heaven” can keep us from the actual love of God or neighbor! A pure act of love is its own reward, and needs nothing in return. Love is shown precisely in an eagerness to love.

--Fr. Richard Rohr

Every other week, I write a short reflection for the meditation group I facilitate, and that's what I'll be doing later this morning. The quotation above was in Rohr's daily meditation today, and it struck home, so it became my starting point. All of my meditations this fall have been about different aspects of "letting go." Letting go of the desire for reward is a pretty important, and extremely difficult, lifelong task. It's certainly something I've struggled with myself, and that makes it easier to write about.

The contemplative group meets on the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month, at the cathedral, downtown, at 5:45 pm. In the summer it's hot and stuffy, and we hear the busy sounds of the city outside mingled with the whirring of fans as we sit; light still streams through the brilliant colors of the stained glass. When we open the big red doors and walk outside, an hour later, there's still sunlight on the big formal beds of tulips and, later, begonias and coleus; the homeless people and itinerant kids who sleep on our grounds will be lolling around, sharing something to eat, playing with their dogs -- last summer one of them had a ferret on a leash -- and we'll greet each other with a wave and bon soir. The day still stretches ahead of everyone, even at nearly 7 pm.

Now it's dark already by the time we arrive. The big stone cathedral may be too warm, or it may be chilly: it's hard to predict, so I wear layers. I come to the cathedral early to set up the chapel with a rug, cushions, chairs, and a single candle at the center of our rectangle. Then I might have coffee or do an errand, but I come back in time to attend Evening Prayer, or Vespers, at 5:15, which is chanted on Tuesdays.

There may be five of us, or seven, or maybe as many as ten. The church is dim; an icon stands in front of the chancel steps; candles are burning there and on the candle stands to the right and left, and sometime someone wanders in, comes up, and lights a candle during the service. At the beginning of the service, the leader - always a lay person - calls us to worship, and then the church bells in the tower above us ring the Angelus: three bells, three bells, three bells, nine bells. The day is done; the potato-diggers in Millet's field -- which looks so much like rural Quebec -- stop and pray. Then the lights come up enough for us to see our psalters and prayer books, and together we chant a psalm and the canticles for the day's liturgy; the lessons for the day are read aloud - one from the Old Testament and one from the Gospels; and then we pray for the world, for the sick and dying, the homeless and lonely, the prisoners and captives, for our city, for each other. We pray by name for the people who have asked us to pray for them; there are always white slips of paper in a container near the candlestand; unfolded they contain a name, or sometimes a little more information: "Susan. Celine. Ma mere. For Charles who is in hospital. Pour la memoire d'Antoine."

Our chanting is supposed to be in unison, and we try; in the time since I've been doing this the chant has improved. But these are not professional singers and that is the beauty of it. I always recall Thomas Merton's struggles "in choir"-- the choir of monks who sang the "daily offices" in his monastery -- and after smiling in recognition of his discomfort and our shared tendency toward perfectionism, I let go of the idea that our singing -- including my own singing -- needs to be perfect. It is perfect, however it is.

And then when Evening Prayer is finished, I get up and go to the meditation chapel and light the big handmade-by-nuns candle that I brought for us from Mexico. I sit down, and wait for the participants to gather. Again, we may be four, or six, or nine. I welcome everyone, explain the order of things to any newcomers, give my little talk, for ten minutes or so, and then we sit in silence for twenty minutes, when there is a bell, and some people leave, and others sit for another twenty.

When we finish, the cathedral is very dark, and even dim color is hard to distinguish in the stained glass windows. The verger will lock up, or sometimes the liturgical dancers come in for a rehearsal; tonight I think there's a poetry workshop. But we'll remain in silence as we return the chairs to their normal configuration, put away the candle and the rug, straighten up the room, and then leave through the side door.

Outside, now, the ground is frozen, and the homeless people will be wrapped up in sleeping bags and cardboard along the side of the Bay -- the department store across the street -- or wandering in the metro before trying to find the place where they'll spend the night. These are people who don't want to go to shelters, or aren't allowed in because they use drink or drugs, or keep a dog. During the days, some of them will have come inside the cathedral to get warm, and at night some continue to sleep on the stone steps under the front portico facing St. Catherine Street. Though it must be very cold they seem to feel that they're safe with their backs to the old stones and the gargoyles grimacing above them; that, in some way, it's their home.

Francis of Assisi granted all of reality, even elements and animals, an intimate I-Thou relationship. He called all things “sister” and “brother.” This could be a definition of what it means to be a contemplative, which is to look at reality with much wider eyes than mere usability, functionality, or self-interest, but with inherent enjoyment for a thing in itself as itself. Remember, as soon as your loving needs or wants a reward in return, you have backed away from divine love, which is why even our common notion of a “reward in heaven” can keep us from the actual love of God or neighbor! A pure act of love is its own reward, and needs nothing in return. Love is shown precisely in an eagerness to love.

November 20, 2014

Ursula LeGuin made this speech last night at the National Book Awards, where she was honored. A wise woman who has looked at the way "powers and principalities" work for most of her life, LeGuin spoke about both the need for writers who can envision a different and better reality, and about the current dangers of writing-as-commodity. Her speech was not long, but wisdom doesn't need many words. She said, in part:

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

and

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

--

I've been talking about these things -- the role of the writer in current affairs -- recently with my friends T.C. and Parmanu, and I'm ashamed to admit that my attitude has been more discouraged and even cynical than it should be. In the face of the powers "we the people" are confronting today, it is very hard to see how the voices of writers and artists can create real change. The deteriorating, intractable situation in the Middle East, in particular, along with recent elections and the political leadership in much of the western world, have made me feel even less empowered than usual. But I should know better: that's not the point, as I know deep down, and have said before. Art needs to express the truth, but it also needs to point toward something better: to keep hope alive. The Russian and Eastern European poets who've always inspired me knew this very well; so have many of the writers and artists of Latin America. Emerging voices of women and oppressed minorities from around the world are beginning to be heard through literature, art, photography -- but what about here, in North America?

Part of the problem for me, I've come to realize, is being a white privileged American: who wants to listen to us? And what, exactly, do we have to say? But here is LeGuin, instantly making that point, simply telling the truth not with bombast, but with the quiet authority gained not only through her long career, but her long human life observing the ways of the world. As the western world changes in so many ways for the worse, it's incumbent on those of us who've seen that change to speak about it, to express what we are observing, and what's in danger. But I'm not convinced this response has to be done in a negative or overtly critical way; it's also possible to write or make art that simply shows a different reality, a different way of being. I know I've been marking time, a bit, in my own work -- and that's OK, we need to do that sometimes. But eventually, hopefully, we find the way to move forward and express something true and meaningful. I'm grateful for my younger writer-friends who are more idealistic, perhaps, and push me to look beyond my own discouragement -- to dig deeper.

Last night I read a few short stories by the Chinese dissident writer and painter Gao Xingjian. I've never read his work, though he won the Nobel in 2000. Because of his criticism of the government, everything he has written is banned in China; he lives in Paris and is now 74 years old. The stories I read, from his collection "Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather," were a revelation. In just a few words, he conveys everything he wants to say: the story of a newlywed couple climbing up a hill to see a rural temple becomes weighted with enormous anxiety that we realize is the result of his past years in "reeducation" farm work - something Gao himself endured. But this is conveyed in a simple vignette, mainly through dialogue.

It's in almost direct contrast to the lengthy, description-rich work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I've just read finished the massive recent biography of Marquez, and re-read Love in the Time of Cholera and am halfway through a re-reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude:a book filled with protest but also so rich with humanity and truth abotu power that it spoke not only to a whole continent, but to human beings everywhere.

It's not given to most of us to be like these three writers, but we all have our part to play. I know that as an artist, a publisher, and a person, I can hide my light under a bushel, or sell out to commerce, or continually nurture the light shining within myself, for my sake and that of others. It's really my choice.

November 05, 2014

Still life with spice grinder, embroidered cloth, and two walnuts. pen on paper. November 4, 2014.

I sat down after dinner, wanting to draw a little, but feeling tired from a long day and rather uninspired. Looking around for some objects to arrange, this small brass spice grinder caught my eye. I felt it needed something soft with it, a cloth, but nothing too elaborate. I pulled out a simple embroidered white linen napkin. Now, what else? The bowl of nuts on the sideboard offered two wrinkly but substantial walnuts.

For some reason, this subject or my mood didn't lend themselves to the simple line drawings I've been doing lately, and I found myself working more methodically, with more detail, maybe because I was tired and not feeling very playful or light. As a result, it's not a very good drawing, but the artistic merit isn't what interests me about it.

It wasn't until this morning that I realized this is actually a portrait of my parents in-law: the solid brass spice grinder with its Arabic inscription reminding me of my father-in-law; the fine, delicate cloth with Armenian embroidery is one of a set that I received from my mother-in-law, and the two walnuts -- separate, tightly enclosed in their shells, but definitely related and creating a bridge between the other objects -- are a comment on their personalities and their relationship. The walnuts are the most interesting choice here, to me, since their symbolism didn't occur to me at all at the time.

It doesn't really matter if we're working realistically or abstractly, or in whatever medium: the subconscious will be involved if we are at all open to allowing it. I've been thinking a lot about the family I married into, especially after being in Florida, and it's fascinating to see how this was expressed without my thinking about it intellectually, just by allowing myself to follow out spontaneous instincts in the choosing and arranging of some objects. Probably, being somewhat fatigued and aimless actually helped with that. Jung believed in this kind of exploration and wrote a lot about it, art therapy uses these principles, but I'm more apt to think about my dreams, or to notice what comes up in meditation, than to use drawing or art as a way of understanding my own subconscious mind.

September 08, 2014

I'm sleeping better now, and yesterday had the joy of singing all day. Why do I feel reluctant before going back to it in the fall, when music is the place ​ -- that country completely without borders --​ where I feel the most sense of "home?" In the morning: Lassus, Pitoni, and John Tavener's "Lord's Prayer;" in the afternoon, Orlando Gibbons and a big anthem by ​Charles Villiers ​Stanford on the same text as one of the Gibbons pieces, "G​lorious ​and Powerful God."

I've included a clip of the Tavener for you.​ The music, almost too simple (which is where its difficulty lies) is marked "At the limits of audibility." We sang it after communion, and it was one of those moments when we sang as one body​. I think everyone was glad to be back together, doing what we do.

During the afternoon rehearsal, as we were singing from the chancel, a visitor came up and stood near the director's podium until we reached the end of one of the Gibbons pieces, and then spoke to the choir - our director seemed pretty put off at first; understandably, he doesn't want rehearsals interrupted by strangers, and usually when someone approaches the chancel while we're rehearsing, they turn out to be unstable, and need to be gently guided away by a verger. This man, though, spoke with authority and understanding.

"I've been listening to you for the past half hour," he said, "and I'm terribly sorry I can't stay for the service at 4, but I have to reboard a tour bus that is leaving soon. I just want to say that what you're doing is extraordinary -- the sound is very very beautiful -- I just walked into the church from the street and never expected to find people here, doing this. And I know: I am a choir director myself, from Switzerland. Thank you, thank you," and then he smiled at us, inclined his head to the choir and nodded to our director, and walked off. I caught a last glimpse of him standing by the side door in the dimness, where he could quickly leave for his bus; he was leaning against a pillar, head back and eyes shut, still listening.

August 29, 2014

Already, almost September, after a beautiful summer. In my weaker moments, I've complained that we spent too much of it in the city, but honestly, the weather in Montreal has been so lovely this year, the trees so green, that I've enjoyed nearly every day. It hasn't been hot - we've managed with fans and didn't even go to the basement to lug up the air conditioner and install it - but that's fine with me. I haven't gone to the botanical garden or walked on Mount Royal, and because of work pressures I've been in my garden less than usual, and in the studio more, but we've also gone to the market more often, and discovered some new treasures in Little Italy, along with many happy evenings and days with friends here, and friends who've visited. It's been a delight getting to know my new friend Priya who just moved here from India, and to think about what it must be like to see this part of the world through her eyes.

Happiness begins (I remind myself when I start to get nudgy) by wanting what you have. Even though I will always have the woods and wilderness in my heart, I've become a city-dweller for good reasons. Living in a fairly far-northern city like Montreal means dealing with weather, a short growing season, and constant change. People here aren't static, and although life is perhaps slower than in the U.S., they move, adapt, change; they are open to new experiences, and many of them consciously seek that out. The flow of languages in the buses and on the street has seeped into my own life and my own head; I'm studying Spanish on Duolingo, and working on my French there too; it astounds me how many of the people I've come to know here are bi-, tri-, and even more multi-lingual. Last night we sat with friends outside a cafe eating cornets of delicious frozen egg custard (like soft ice cream but richer, with eggs). Another group of friends gathered nearby, drinking coffee, petting a little Italian greyhound, their conversation moving seamlessly from French to Italian to English. Later, we stopped in the neighborhood park to watch tango dancers in a covered bandstand; it was the last of the weekly Tango Argentinian nights for the summer: slowly, the dancers circled the floor, the women elegant and strong; the men focussed, assured; their tango an expression of desire, tension, and surrender, of the bittersweet and beautiful dance of life between our beginnings and endings.

The world remains violent and troubled, and we are all very aware of that, but last night I was reminded how the peace and renewal I've always sought in nature are also available right here; I just have to look more deeply. Human beings are an intrinsic part of nature, and we too contain all of its silence and mystery.